During the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, experts worried that disruptions to cancer diagnosis and treatment would cost lives. A new study suggests they were right. The federally funded study published Thursday by the medical journal JAMA Oncology is being called the first to assess the effects of pandemic-related disruptions on the short-term survival of cancer patients, per the AP. Researchers found that people diagnosed with cancer in 2020 and 2021 had worse short-term survival than those diagnosed between 2015 and 2019. That was true across a range of cancers, and whether they were diagnosed at a late or early stage.
Of course, COVID-19 itself was especially dangerous to patients already weakened by cancer, but the researchers worked to filter out deaths mainly attributed to the coronavirus, so they could see if other factors played a role. The researchers weren't able to definitively show what drove worse survival, says the University of Kentucky's Todd Burus, the study's lead author. However, "disruptions to the health care system were probably a key contributor," says Burus, who specializes in medical data analysis. COVID-19 forced many people to postpone cancer screenings—colonoscopies, mammograms, lung scans, and the like—as the coronavirus overwhelmed doctors and hospitals, especially in 2020.
The new study tapped national cancer registry data to focus more specifically on patients who had a first diagnosis of a malignant cancer in 2020 and 2021. The scientists looked at one-year survival rates for those patients, checking for what stage they were at the time of diagnosis. They calculated that one-year survival was lower for both early- and late-stage diagnoses, for all cancer sites combined. Overall, the researchers found that more than 96% of people who got an early-stage cancer diagnosis in 2020 and 2021—and more than 74% of those with a late-stage diagnosis—survived more than a year.
Those rates were slightly lower than would've been expected based on 2015-2019 trends, resulting in about 17,400 more deaths than expected. Most worrisome were large differences seen in colorectal, prostate, and pancreatic cancers, the scientists say. Recinda Sherman, a researcher with the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries who wasn't involved with the new study, applauds the work. "As this study is the first to document pandemic-related, cause-specific survival, I think it is important," she says. "The more we understand about the impact of COVID-19, the better we will be able to prepare for the next one."
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